For the past 15 years, you’d be hard-pressed to find a time when Christine Baranski was not starring in a beloved TV show. Leapfrogging from legal drama The Good Wife to its spinoff The Good Fight to the dishy HBO period series The Gilded Age, the Emmy and Tony-winning actress has become the go-to name when it comes to finding someone to play a well-heeled, side-eying, champagne-sipping woman who takes no shit.
This spring, she excels at not one but two of those roles: Victoria, a self-described “neglectful but also smothering” mother with a secret on the shroomed-out second season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers; and Agnes, the uppity matriarch desperate to maintain her social standing on the third season of The Gilded Age, premiering June 22. “Strong women, women with a certain kind of flamboyance or a certain kind of wit—I’ve been playing characters like this since I left Juilliard,” Baranski tells Marie Claire over Zoom from her New York home. “It must be the raw material that is me,” she adds with her signature cheek.
